Bridging DevOps culture and Tech for Jooble, a Top Recruitment Platform

Jooble, a leading job recruitment platform, sought our consulting services. While their technical foundation was solid, the company required fresh insights and a renewed sense of direction. IT Outposts aimed to provide an objective perspective, either validating their current trajectory or charting a new course.

The culmination of our collaboration was a one-year roadmap designed to improve Jooble’s teamwork and unlock the full potential of their infrastructure setup.

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Project Description
Provided Services
Work agenda

Audit Findings and Recommendations
Results

Project Description

IT Outposts conducted an audit across various DevOps facets, including standardization of CI/CD pipelines, alerting mechanisms, and escalation protocols. We provided technical recommendations for improvements and also focused on organizational consulting.

Our main goal was to help break down team silos and promote better cross-functional cooperation — the core essence of DevOps. By uniting development and operations efforts, Jooble could unlock DevOps’ true potential.

Provided Services

DevOps Services

Infrastructure and architecture consulting

Work agenda

Client

Leading job recruitment platform
jooble.org

Location

Ukraine

Technical team

Lead DevOps engineer
DevOps engineer

Project timeframe

February 2023 - April 2023

Budget

15,000

Project goals

Provide technical recommendations and a one-year roadmap for implementing best practices

Improve collaboration among Jooble's technical teams

Audit Findings and Recommendations

Cross-department collaboration

DevOps is more than automation tools and processes — it's a mindset of collaboration between the Dev and Ops teams. However, a common issue in many organizations is the lack of team communication. While Jooble’s infrastructure is well-established, with separate teams for DevOps, network engineering, support, and development, these departments operated with minimal interaction.

Here's what we advised to address the lack of cross-team communication:

Create a central knowledge base all employees can access. The repository can serve as a valuable resource for training new employees or helping existing ones learn new skills.
Hold regular meetings where teams from different departments can share updates, discuss challenges, and work together to find solutions.
Encourage programs where employees can temporarily work in other departments or roles. This exposure can help them better understand and relate to others, break down barriers between teams, and share knowledge.
Use digital collaboration tools to enable easy communication, document sharing, and virtual brainstorming sessions, especially for remote or distributed teams.

Scalability and high availability

Upon examining the current system architecture, we determined that it wasn’t built with high scalability and high availability as primary design considerations. We made the following recommendations:

Configure a highly available (HA) architecture to ensure system redundancy and fault tolerance.
Migrate the MySQL database and message queues/streaming components to a Kubernetes environment. Containers make it easier to scale up capacity when needed and keep services available.
Implement readiness and liveness probes for Kubernetes deployments. These checks let Kubernetes determine if a container is ready for traffic and running properly, thus facilitating self-healing capabilities and smooth scaling.

Infrastructure modernization

During the assessment, our experts also noted that the existing infrastructure components required modernization. Otherwise, this might lead to inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and potential configuration drift. Here’s what would help:

Define all the configurations as code. This allows for automation, ensures consistency across environments, and provides version control so changes can be tracked.
Thoroughly test and validate the infrastructure code before deploying it to production systems. This extra testing phase helps make sure the defined configurations are stable and work correctly without issues.
After initially transitioning to the infrastructure-as-code approach, go through an optimization phase. During this phase, fine-tune the configuration and address any performance bottlenecks or scalability limitations discovered.

CI/CD standardization

Within the CI/CD domain, we found out that there was a lack of standardized and consistent processes across projects and teams for CI/CD practices. Here’s what our experts advised:

Use a GitOps approach where Git repositories contain all the infrastructure code definitions. Automate deploying infrastructure based on code changes in Git.
Create a standard process for building, testing, and deploying applications that all teams follow consistently. Document this process.
Automate deployments to production using tools that allow switching between two identical environments (Blue/Green), enabling seamless updates and rollbacks if needed.
Provide training and ongoing support so team members can use the new tools and follow the standardized processes correctly.
Review and update the processes and tools regularly to keep them efficient as requirements change or new technologies emerge.
Have a thorough testing plan that includes unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests to ensure high quality and reliability before deploying applications.

Monitoring and logging

During the audit of the monitoring and logging capabilities, we discovered that the existing monitoring system might not provide comprehensive visibility into the entire infrastructure and application performance. The key recommendations to address this were:

Set up a robust monitoring system across the infrastructure, including networking components like Nginx, databases like Consul, and any other critical services.
Create easy-to-understand dashboards and visualizations that give a clear picture of the different infrastructure components’s health. This would allow Jooble to troubleshoot problems before they become bigger.

Alerting and escalation flow

The existing system for detecting issues and responding to them would require the following adjustments:

Create a robust alerting system that covers all critical business metrics and potential issues, ensuring no blind spots.
Consider integrating the alerting system with existing monitoring tools and applications to streamline the exposure of business metrics and provide a unified view of potential issues.
Establish a clear escalation flow for critical alerts, specifying the roles, responsibilities, and communication channels involved to ensure timely response.
Regularly review and update the alerting processes based on feedback from the operations team. Adapt it as the business needs change over time.
Train the operations team on how to interpret different types of alerts, troubleshoot issues, and follow the escalation protocols.

Contacts

Ready to elevate your team’s collaboration and performance? Contact IT Outposts to discover how we can enhance teamwork and optimize infrastructure through cutting-edge DevOps practices, just like we did for Jooble. Whether you’re aiming to boost cross-functional collaboration, scale seamlessly, or modernize your architecture, our expertise is your solution.

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Results

While IT Outposts provided recommendations for improvements, Jooble already had a strong technical foundation. Our experts confirmed they’re on the right track. With our guidance on promoting cross-functional cooperation, we are confident that Jooble can successfully master the cultural side of DevOps as well.